Please take a moment to read the article I’m leading into here, and if your time is perhaps too short to read until we get there, please scroll directly down to the article link. At the very least, you need to save this one for later. (And/or share it with your representatives if you are contacting them about H.R. 4701).

I’m a well educated person with a fairly considerable academic and professional background in the sciences. I may not always sound like it when typing through Lyme symptoms.

I’m able to be objective about my care and objective in evaluating issues and information pertaining to science. I believe medicine should be an interdisciplinary field that strongly involves science. There can be obstacles to proper care when medicine is treated as if it were purely science, because this just simply is not the case.

Yet the CDC and IDSA continue to speak as if a purely scientific approach to Lyme diagnosis is a) adequate, and b) what they are advocating. Their guidelines are not supported by logic or science and are causing significant harm to patients.

There are significant flaws in the tests they advocate, the way they are administered and interpreted, and the diagnostic context in which they have conditioned doctors to use them (causing doctors to lose sight of the fact that Lyme disease is a CLINICAL diagnosis).

I’ll try to update this paragraph with more background resources on two tiered testing and the general problems it poses. In the mean time, it is worth searching through resources on websites such Lymedisease.org and Lyme Disease Association for more on this topic. And skimming through the various Under Our Skin excerpts provided on their Youtube page would lead to some useful references to this problem as well (I’m pretty sure).

There is background enough in this article, however, to give a clear context for the discrepancies they so competently discuss. Among the important points are:

Appropriate context for CDC surveillance case definition (not intended, even by CDC, to be a substitute for sound judgement or to be used for diagnosis)